1 Have Sex and Make Babies...

"To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering." 

- Friedrich Nietzsche

 A few years ago, I decided that life is meaningless. Well, less decided and more realized. This did not go over well with few-years-ago Sydney. It's hard to realize that everything you've done, everything you will do, has no rhyme or reason. Everything was hopeless and miserable.

That is, until I also realized something else. Yes, life has no meaning. There's no set assigned meaning. Our purpose in life isn't to have sex and make babies anymore. Life is a blank slate.

But that's the point. It's a blank slate. It means that the world is full of possibilities. Life has no meaning, thus you can assign any meaning to it.  Life is meaningless so we can assign meaning to our life.

For me, education, communication, literature, and people hold meaning.

Education is the most important though. Without education we have nothing. I guess the meaning in education  comes from my constant exposure to educators. Both of my parents have worked for CPS for many years. So have some of my aunts. I've always been around teachers and I see what happens when people are well educated and what happens when they aren't. I've seen how much school can help and how much teachers love and will do for their students.

And I've seen what it's done for me. I've seen how I'm a lot better off than other people of my background. I attribute that to my parents' emphasis on education which they passed on to me.

A lot of people have something against schools and I can understand why. The  basic set up for a school is very linear. Every day feels like it's filled with busywork and it can be mind-numbing. I get it. But I feel like that's the system's fault, not education itself. Education is wonderful. Without education, we wouldn't be able to know. We need basic knowledge. We learn from the subjects in ways you wouldn't expect. You just have to assign meaning to it, find what you're actually getting from it. From presentations in class you learn public speaking, working in group, and how to communicate ideas effectively to others. From math class, you learn to approach problems in your life from different ways. From history you learn from others' mistakes. And it goes on. You won't remember a lot of it later in life. You won't remember names and dates, the specifics. But you'll remember the lessons from it. You'll remember the true meaning, even if you don't realize you remember. After all, after a certain point we don't even known how we know what we know.

My point is, education is majorly important, not just for succeeding in life but for making it through. There are things we learn from the education system that we need to function for the rest of our lives, even if the presentation of the information is crap at the moment. You need to know how to live under a routine. You need to learn how to deal with authority. you need to learn how to deal with deadlines and commitments and how to balance your life. Education is more than just plugging and chugging with equations. Education is everywhere in life. It's lessons you learn from biographies and it's tolerance you get when you sit next to that really annoying kid in 5th period. Education is how we prepare for the future and it's incredibly important. You can tell the people who never learned certain skills and you can tell how it hurt them. You know the only children who never learned to share. You know the people who never had to present or deal with being forced with others. They stick out with like a sore thumb because they struggle with things in which they were not educated in.

Education has meaning to me. It's how I'm preparing for the future. Sometimes, I'm really sure that I'm not going to make it. I'm sure that my days are numbered and I don't have the most time left. Education is how I'm more confident that I'm not just going to fail come adult life. And that's important to me. Really important.  And thus education is.